Has anybody yet seen a Archos Gmini 400?
It is another MP3 player, plus a color screen that will show movies. Internal 20GB hard drive and USB2 port. $350. Except for the movie-screen (which PCMag says works well for a 2" display and quite well when adapted to a TV set) it is just another iPod, yawn.
Except: it records. Yes, many pocket-packs record, but mostly to MP3 and many only to RAM-card. 128K MP3 is a fine playback format, but not my preference for mastering fine music on location, and I need hours of recording time.
This records to WAV, 44KHz. I assume this is 16-bit stereo(???), and thus "as good as CD-R". Except it is smaller than a CDR4U, and should hold 30 hours of 44KHz-WAV. A music school's hell-week in a pocket!
For live recording obviously it needs an analog source: mikes and preamps or mixer, and for many gigs a protective limiter would be wise. Fitting all that in the other pocket might be tight.
I can also see a use: a musician keeps this with him, with adapters, and asks to leave it plugged into the board at all studio sessions. It would take days to fill it, and it can be dumped via USB2 pretty fast through a PC to a 120GB $95 hard drive, and backed-up on 5GB data DVDs. Then if the artist dies at the peak of her career, the heirs can mine hundreds of hours of sessions for tribute albums.
It is another MP3 player, plus a color screen that will show movies. Internal 20GB hard drive and USB2 port. $350. Except for the movie-screen (which PCMag says works well for a 2" display and quite well when adapted to a TV set) it is just another iPod, yawn.
Except: it records. Yes, many pocket-packs record, but mostly to MP3 and many only to RAM-card. 128K MP3 is a fine playback format, but not my preference for mastering fine music on location, and I need hours of recording time.
This records to WAV, 44KHz. I assume this is 16-bit stereo(???), and thus "as good as CD-R". Except it is smaller than a CDR4U, and should hold 30 hours of 44KHz-WAV. A music school's hell-week in a pocket!
For live recording obviously it needs an analog source: mikes and preamps or mixer, and for many gigs a protective limiter would be wise. Fitting all that in the other pocket might be tight.
I can also see a use: a musician keeps this with him, with adapters, and asks to leave it plugged into the board at all studio sessions. It would take days to fill it, and it can be dumped via USB2 pretty fast through a PC to a 120GB $95 hard drive, and backed-up on 5GB data DVDs. Then if the artist dies at the peak of her career, the heirs can mine hundreds of hours of sessions for tribute albums.